Hi everybody welcome to another episode
of Exploring Photography,
right here on AdoramaTV.
I’m mark wallace and this is
Emily and we're in London we were
planning to go out and shoot about and
get some nice environmental portraits
and some really cool stuff but it is
freezing outside and so we really don't
want to do that, but we do want to do is
sort of emulate the look of being
outside and so what we decided to do is
say; hey Emily wear your coat,
we're going to come into the studio and
there's a trick that we can use to
create some look that, it's not going to
look like we're outside, but it's going to
give some depth to our portraits to make
them look a little more interesting than
they would if we just had
a flat background.
Now you can do this at home
you don't need a lot of stuff in fact
we're going to be shooting with the ambient
light that we have here in the studio we
just have a couple of LED panels that
are illuminating me right now, so you can
use those at home or whatever light you
happen to have, it doesn't really take
anything fancy but the thing that you do
need to have, well you need three things;
one you need some LED lights like these
little guys right here, you can get these
at almost any little craft store.
You also need to have a tripod for your
camera and you need to have a lens that
has a really wide aperture that can give
you amazing bokeh. So I'm using a
50mm, 1.4 so if you've got an 85mm, 1.2
or 50mm, 1.4 or whatever it is?
You just need to have a lens
that has a really wide aperture,
that's going to give you bokeh.
So what we're going to do in this setup is we're
going to use these little lights, we're
going to put them in front of Emily and
that's going to give us something that
is out of focus, some nice bokeh in front
of the subject, instead of what we'd
normally do which is put our bokeh
something out of focus, behind our subject.
That's going to give our
portrait some depth and it's going to
make it look really cool so let's get
started right now.
Let's start shooting and so
I have my LED lights right here
now what you'll notice is when you put
these in front of the lens, they go out
of focus if they're really close and
that is especially true if you have a
lens that has a really wide aperture
like a f1.4, f1.2 aperture so that is key.
Make sure you have a 50mm or longer lens
with a really wide aperture and we're
going to be putting the bokeh, the
out of focus stuff, in front of our
subject, instead of behind the subject,
which is what we normally do so
it's front bokeh. I guess that's what you
would call it, alright, so to do this
there are few things that we have to
really pay attention to,
and one of those things is motion,
and our shutter speed in here, we don't have
a lot of light but we have enough
ambient light to shoot at a shutter speed
of 1/90 of a second and so I've already
used my built-in light meter to see that
at f1.4, that wide open aperture
the correct exposure at ISO 400 is 1/90 of
a second so we don't have to worry too
much about cameras shake, but what we do have
to worry about, because we're really
close to our subject, we're shooting f1.4,
that means our depth of field is really
shallow and that means if my camera
moves or if Emily moves,
just a little bit,
she's going to be out of focus, so to
combat that, what we've done is I put my
camera on a tripod. That keeps me from
moving around and then we have Emily
standing on a little mark, so there's a line
on the floor, and so I said Emily stay
there and don't move around when we're
taking pictures,
so she knows, that she has to pose,
hold that pose, I’ll take a picture then
she can move, hold the pose, take a
picture and I'm shooting with the Leica
so, I'm manually focusing everything and
so it's a little bit trickier than your
camera that has autofocus,
okay so that's what we have.
We have; ISO 400,
an aperture of f1.4,
In this light, which is super bright
we’re shooting at 1/90 of a second, we're
focusing and then taking a picture so
I’m going to do that first, just to show
you what this looks like, so Emily look
right into the lens,
beautiful, and Emily
is a fantastic model and so just with
this light we have something that looks
really good but it doesn't look
environmental, like we're outside it
doesn't have any depth. So now we're
going to add these lights. Now one of the
most important things to do when you're
doing this is you have to shoot in manual
mode if you let your camera do all the
exposure stuff, as soon as you put these
lights in front of the lens, the lights
are going to confuse the built-in light
meter and your exposure is going to be
all wrong.
So this is shot in manual mode again
f1.4, 1/90 of a second, ISO 400 so we're
going to focus on Emily like that and
because I’m shooting with the
rangefinder, I can't see through the lens
so I’m using Live View
to place these lights, so I can see sort
of exactly where they are, when I get to
a place I like, BAM! I'm going to take a
shot, put these little bit further away
like that to take these, or out so we
don't have quite as many in the shot.
Keep my hand out, beautiful just like
that. I love that. Okay and that's all there
is to it you're going to have to play around a
little bit use Live View, that's going to
help you achieve this, move these closer and farther
away from your subject.
Use maybe one or
two of these little lights, clump them all
up together and so once you start doing
that you're going to see some really
cool results we're going to shoot, I’m
going to throw these into Lightroom and
then I’ll show you my results
Alright well I love those pictures Emily.
I think that we did a really good job
with what we had and it doesn't take a
lot, just some imagination, some LED
lights, a wonderful model and a wide open
aperture and you can create that depth
in your image.
Well thanks for joining us for this
episode of Exploring Photography, Emily
thank you for being here.
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